Fisheries committee  You have to get the industry out of the ocean, because if you have a powerful agriculture branch now promoting it being in the ocean, I think we'll remain in deadlock, and wild salmon just don't have that time left.

Fisheries committee  Sure.

Fisheries committee  That actually did happen. An eagle picked up a salmon but dropped it on the beach, and I was able to sample it. Furthermore, I had to go to the supermarkets and sushi restaurants to do the sampling. The Broughton Archipelago transition initiative has gotten top scientists on the

Fisheries committee  I have not personally, but I have stayed up to date on the science. One thing you need to really be careful of is that seals and sea lions, for example, eat an enormous amount of hake, and hake is a fish that preys on juvenile salmon. Once you start messing with the natural ord

Fisheries committee  I'm aware of the decision, but sea lice are the problem here. We have the salinity that is perfect for sea lice. If you do go into the southern Puget Sound, closer to the rivers and further from the ocean, you do get lower salinities. For the farms that are in lower salinities in

Fisheries committee  No, it's not. We're in complete agreement with many DFO scientists, particularly those in the genomic lab. It's a split within DFO, which is so—

Fisheries committee  You have one scientist in DFO saying piscine orthoreovirus is local to British Columbia and benign, and another one who is showing evidence that it's from Norway and is very impactful. This is really unbecoming for DFO to have its [Technical difficulty—Editor].

Fisheries committee  As Elizabeth May said, there's been deliberate dishonesty within the science in DFO, so open the windows and doors and let in the science from the outside. Right now, with DFO science, some of it is an extreme outlier—failing to recognize the impact of sea lice, and the impacts

Fisheries committee  Yes. Trying to understand what DFO was doing in terms of salmon farms was a very frustrating, long experience until I started accessing their actual emails and could understand what was going on. There are long chains of emails where DFO biologists are trying to figure out what

Fisheries committee  Thank you. I absolutely agree. I know where the rot is because I have ordered thousands of pages of conversations between DFO employees, but a lot of the worst players have left. It's very interesting. After the Discovery Islands decision, for example, Allison Webb left. The lea

Fisheries committee  Thank you for that. Wild salmon leave the river small. They go out into the open ocean and they basically collect the energy of the sun hitting the open ocean, because they feed on animals that feed on the zooplankton, stimulated by the sun. Then they carry those nutrients up in

Fisheries committee  I think this goes back to building a better pathway between the science and the minister. There have been warnings about the decline of wild salmon, very strong warnings, but because a lot of it has been suppressed, the fishermen don't really grasp what is going on, so I believe

Fisheries committee  I honestly think that both have to happen. I think that DFO has to have a watchdog at this point, to make sure the science is getting through, but unless it's happening inside, I don't see how the minister is going to be properly briefed. We, in British Columbia, currently have

Fisheries committee  Very briefly, sea lice are very easy to study, because they change their body shape every few days, so you know where they get on the fish. I studied them in the Broughton Archipelago since 2001. When the previous minister, Bernadette Jordan, prohibited restocking of the Discove

Fisheries committee  Thank you. The questions you pose are critical to Canadians because DFO management of wild salmon has failed to maintain the fish or the fisheries. Wild salmon must reach the open ocean, and salmon farms are a barrier to them. The problem is that, as salmon farms release unnatu